1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a radio communication system and, in particular, to a file downloading apparatus and method for a mobile terminal, which are capable of downloading files from a certain server on a public network.
2. Description of the Related Art
As technologies advance quickly in the radio communication field, the development of contents applicable to the radio communication environment will give new opportunities to computer game businesses. Among them, a business for providing digital contents to mobile terminals such as cellular phones stands out as one of the most promising fields. Accessing the contents web sites using mobile terminals is rapidly increasing.
Due to the commercialization of the IMT-200 represented by a third generation mobile communication system, it is possible to download a large data file containing data such as music, movie, game, etc. to a mobile terminal and use it.
In a general mobile communication system supporting the file download operations, when a subscriber wants to download a file from a certain site on the Internet, a mobile terminal transmits an Internet connection request signal including an IP address of a contents server to a base station system (BTS). The BTS then establishes a connection between the mobile terminal and the contents server on the Internet through a gateway using the information in the Internet connection request signal. When the connection to the contents server is established, the mobile terminal can download a specific file through keypad manipulation.
However, in the conventional mobile communication system, if the mobile terminal gets away from the BTS or if other mobile terminals simultaneously access the BTS while the current mobile terminal is connected to the contents server and downloading a file, then a data transmission rate is lowered, resulting in the increase of a download time and cost.
Furthermore, when the mobile terminal retries to download the file which is not completely downloaded because the download connection is unwontedly released, the conventional file downloading method has another drawback in that the mobile terminal must re-download the entire file again even though a portion of the associated file has already been downloaded during the previous interrupted connection. The undesired interruption of the download connection can occur due to the mobile terminal entering a radio shadow area, the battery being empty, the voice call reception during the download session, or some other reasons.